


What Happened Then

by Deannie



Series: The Mistake [1]
Category: The Magnificent Seven (TV)
Genre: Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, Magnificent Seven AU: ATF
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-06
Updated: 2016-01-06
Packaged: 2018-05-12 04:13:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5652037
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deannie/pseuds/Deannie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Chris took a deep breath and tried to remember that he was here to help the team as much as himself. If he fell off the cliff again, like he had after Sarah and Adam died, he’d be taking six other innocent men with him—and at least two of them were already hanging on by their fingertips.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Happened Then

**Author's Note:**

> I was cleaning out my writing folders and I came across the notes and a small snippet of this fic and another. I've decided to finish them, though I do sort of feel they're a little OOC. There was never a plan in the imagined series around these for you the reader to know exactly what happened, so you're not actually missing out.
> 
> No actual non-con or violence of any kind occurs in the fic, but please be aware it may be triggery for some.

_September 12, 1999_

”Agent Larabee?” The quiet receptionist was overly polite. _Probably afraid I’m a danger to myself and others,_ he thought. _She probably should be._ “Dr. Gadrick will see you now.”

Chris walked into the office and sat down without saying a word.

“Agent Larabee, it’s nice to meet you.”

Chris snorted, because of course it wasn’t.

The woman before him was a no nonsense agency shrink. She had mousy brown hair, nondescript blue eyes, and a manner that told him she thought she’d seen it all. Niceties over with, she got down to it.

“ADA Travis has asked to be notified of any significant findings in our sessions together. I’ve told him I’ll only agree on your say-so.”

Chris shook his head. There were things he’d never say if he knew Travis would find out. Things that probably needed saying. “I’ll review your notes to him or I walk.”

“You can’t walk, Agent,” she reminded him coolly. “But I’m fine with that.”

“I can walk right out of this room and this job any time I please, Doctor,” he grated. “I’ve done it before.”

She nodded. “When your wife died.”

“My wife _and son_ ,” he corrected coldly, “were murdered.”

She nodded. Because she’d read the file, right? They’d all read the God damned file. The glare he gave her wasn’t even his worst—not by a long shot—but it still managed to stop her in her cool and collected tracks.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Larabee,” she said quietly. “Maybe we should start again. I’m Melanie.”

He didn’t offer her use of his first name.

“All right,” she replied wryly into the silence. “Let’s just get this part over with then: Agent Larabee, you’ve been ordered to attend counseling sessions as a result of the events that took place in August of this year. You are required to attend no fewer than five sessions, each lasting approximately fifty minutes. Do you understand?”

Chris nodded, resisting the verbal affirmative he was required to give. _Melanie_ gave him a stern look and he grunted. “I understand.”

“Good.” She pulled out a yellow legal pad and Chris would have laughed at the stereotype if he’d cared. “Can you tell me what happened, Mr. Larabee?”

He wished he could.

He wished he knew. That familiar anger welled up in him and he dug his fingernails into already scarred palms. No, he knew all right, it was just….

Chris took a deep breath and tried to remember that he was here to help the team as much as himself. If he fell off the cliff again, like he had after Sarah and Adam died, he’d be taking six other innocent men with him—and at least two of them were already hanging on by their fingertips.

“We were investigating an arms dealer named Milton Tarnowski,” he began. “Initially it looked like a simple weapons for drugs situation, but the more we got into it, the more… the more was involved. We couldn’t use our standard techniques. Tarnowski was paranoid—Ezra couldn’t infiltrate his organization no matter how hard he tried.”

“Ezra Standish?” she asked, though he knew she already knew. Why the fuck was she bothering? “He’s the undercover specialist attached to Team Seven?”

He just stared at her. “You know who all my men are. If we’re going to spend the whole session going over the roster, I’m going to take a nap.”

“Not sleeping well?” she shot back.

“Lady….” Chris tamped down on the urge to shoot her and took another deep breath. “Ezra did manage to find out that Tarnowski had a couple of habits we could exploit. One was gambling, which was right up Ezra’s alley. The other was…” Shit. “Tarnowski had a particular taste in his prostitutes.”

“Male prostitutes.” She at least didn’t make it a question this time.

Chris nodded anyway, though.

“Since I _have_ read Agent Standish’s file and am aware of his prior assignments, can I ask why he wasn’t chosen for this part in the operation?”

“He’d already been seen in their usual places—already had his gambling persona set up.” He swallowed thickly. “And he wasn’t Tarnowski’s type.”

> “The men seen on Mr. Tarnowski’s arm appear to be interchangeable for him—I’m told he has a well-appointed suite of rooms for his—” he had choked on the word _harem_ , Chris was sure. “—companions.” The poker face came back up. “They are, to a man, brunet. Scruffy, most of them. Long hair always.” Ezra had gazed sadly and significantly at their two youngest agents. “And young.”

Chris was struck dumb as the memory of JD’s face—the shock and horror there, both in the conference room and later—flashed through him. God, the kid was never going to be the same and it was all his fault.

“So you sent in two agents, then,” Melanie said finally, trying to get the ball rolling again. “Agent Standish at the poker table and Agent Tanner—“

“In Tarnowski’s harem.” Chris finished the statement for her, choking on acid. God, why had he ever agreed to that!?

“Tarnowski?” Melanie tried after a long, tortured silence. “On a scale of one to ten, how bad was he?”

Chris sighed, knowing where she was going with this but not willing to concede the point. “Weapons—heavy arms, poisonous gas—drug trafficking, human trafficking…” He shrugged. There was more. Torture, rape, mutilation…. The list went ever fucking onward….

"So shutting him down—"

"Was a pressing matter, yes," he said because she expected him to.

“And it was Agent Tanner’s idea to place himself in that position?”

Chris tried not to remember that conversation and failed miserably.

> ”What the hell are you going to do, Chris? Send in JD? He hasn’t seen this stuff like I’ve seen it—he’s a God damned innocent. I’ve heard worse at Five Points and you know it. This ain’t gonna be as bad as you think. For me.”
> 
> Chris did know. Vin paid back the debt he felt he owed for his time on the streets by volunteering wherever he was needed, including at the Five Points Community Outreach. His boys were mostly street prostitutes, and far too young. Just the thought of some of the stories Vin had told him about those kids turned his stomach. “It will be for _me_ ,” he murmured. “Worse, probably.”
> 
> Vin had kissed him lightly on the lips. “I can stay out of a bed, Larabee,” he promised, turning tease quickly. “Contrary to how it may seem around here.” He settled in more comfortably on Chris’s couch and took a long pull on his beer. “I’ll have the sick bastard so turned around he won’t know whether he’s coming or… not coming.”
> 
> He’d given Chris that alley cat grin of his and Chris, like a fucking lovesick teenager, had let himself be led around by the nose.

“Yes,” he answered simply.

Melanie wrote something on her legal pad and nodded. “Are you angry with him for that?”

>   
>  _”He’s creative. You gotta give him that.”_
> 
> _“You okay?”_ Buck’s voice was deep and worried.
> 
> _“I’m fine. Bruises heal.”_
> 
> Vin’s words had been light, but even on the recording, Chris could hear the underlying strain in them. It didn’t stop the thin twitch of anger from growing in him as he sat alone in his office, and he damned himself for his reaction. This was Vin, for God’s sake! He was doing his job!
> 
> _“I think I got him on the hook now, though,”_ Vin had continued, passing his information to Buck to be reviewed and discussed with the group. “He don’t see us as much more than toys, so he talks a bit freer around us. And he lets his guard down something awful when you keep him busy.”
> 
> The implication had Chris’s blood boiling and he wished, again, that he hadn’t broken down and listened to the tapes of Buck and Vin’s phone discussions. Hearing it all said so damned casually was killing him.
> 
> _“He’s planning a big meet sometime soon. I heard his second mention someone named Adil. If that’s Sufyan Adil, we got ourselves a hell of a party brewing.”_
> 
> Sufyan Adil was a well known buyer for the Pakistani Border Warriors. Chris had licked his lips nervously at the information.
> 
> _“Gotta go, Buck,”_ Vin’d said quickly, as if steeling himself. _“Milt don’t like to be kept waiting.”_

“He was doing his job.” Chris shrugged. “Sometimes that involves doing things you don’t want to do.”

“Did Mr. Tanner object to the idea of homosexual sex?”

The question was thrown out to trip him up, but Chris had been hiding it for far too long to be caught like that. “I suppose he wouldn’t have volunteered for the job if he did, but I didn’t ask.”

She nodded. “Do you?”

His smile could have frozen fire. “I don’t much care for bigotry. In any arena.”

She wasn’t stupid and he didn’t give a shit. He suspected Travis already knew about him and Vin, but as long as it didn’t end up in any official notes and memos, there would be no _company_ backlash against either of them. And Chris knew from experience that his boys would make sure there was no other kind of backlash, either.

Melanie took the hint and continued poking the healing wounds.

“Were your men able—“ She broke off at the cold look he gave her and rephrased herself. “Your men weren’t able to collect enough information to bring Tarnowski down before Agent Standish was captured. What do you think happened?”

“I made a mistake.”

> “I understand the need for a quick resolution, Mr. Larabee,” Ezra had said quietly, sitting in the conference room at five in the morning a few days later. He had never seen a bed that night, clearly, and was still in the slightly worn suit of his persona as in-over-his-head gambler Eric Strahen. “I’m just not entirely certain how far Tarnowski can be pushed at this point. With Adil arriving within the week, he appears decidedly on edge.” He smirked, but his heart obviously wasn’t in it. He was nervous—and not just about Tarnowski. “I have won more off of him the last couple of days than is usual.”
> 
> “Ezra, I don’t care what it takes,” he’d grated, not realizing until days later in Ezra’s hospital room that he was wrong—he cared too damn much. Not that Ezra had had any reason to believe in that concern that morning in Chris's office. “Just do what you can to get the location of that damn meet-and-greet!”

“I didn’t want them under with Tarnowski any longer than they had to be.” It was only half a lie, but he damned himself for it anyway.

Melanie let the silence stretch out for another few minutes, and Chris stewed in his own juices, unwilling to start talking for fear of what he might say.

“Your team is quite the bunch of misfits.”

His head jerked up at the amused, out of left field, observation.

“They all seem to have quite… checkered pasts.”

“My men are solid,” he told her implacably. “They know their jobs and they do them.” His next words slipped out unbidden. “It’s not their fault I can’t protect them.”

“Is that your job?”

“I’m team leader,” he fired back. “Of course it’s my job. Not one I’ve done much good at lately.”

“Agent Standish said otherwise—at least in his official report.”

Chris had read Ezra’s official report. He’d also seen the look of fear and betrayal in the man’s eyes when he didn’t think anyone was watching. _Wonder what he says to_ his _therapist?_

“Agent Standish is very complimentary about your abilities and your actions during the operation. He goes on to take responsibility for ‘tipping his hand’ to the man’s second-in-command.”

“Ezra’s never been a big fan of the truth,” Chris told her.

She leaned forward. “So what really happened, then, Agent Larabee?” She tapped the files she had piled on the desk between them. “I’ve read the official reports from each of your men. I’ve read the hospital files for Agents Tanner and Standish. It all points to a simple failed investi—“

Chris shot to his feet, slamming his hands down on the desk, and leaned into her space. “There was nothing ‘simple’ about this damn thing at all, lady,” he growled.

“Then tell me what happened.”

She was so like Ezra in her ability to appear completely unruffled that Chris suddenly lost his starch, falling back into the chair and covering his face with both hands.

“I sacrificed one agent for another,” he whispered after an eternity. “Is that what you wanted to hear?” He was met with silence and continued. “I knew pushing Tarnowki was dangerous. I knew his history—fuck, I’d seen the bodies—but…”

But once he knew what was happening behind closed doors, he couldn’t leave Vin there, in Tarnowski’s room, in Tarnowski’s _bed_ , one second longer than he had to. Not that it had made any difference in the end.

> ”How’s Ezra?” Chris had finally left Vin’s hospital room to get some air, surfacing after three hours to try to pick up the pieces of this pathetic excuse of an operation. Ezra had been pale and cold and still when they piled him into the ambulance at the Rising Star, and Chris had had that image in his mind, overlaying the red and hot and shivering of Vin’s survival.
> 
> Nathan had been in the ICU waiting room to meet him with a cup of coffee.
> 
> “Drugs are still in his system, but the doctors think he’ll recover,” Nathan said, not willing to hold out false hope. “Some of his fingers will have to be surgically set. They’ll have plastics come consult when he’s stable, but they won’t be able to risk painkillers or anesthetics for a while.” He sipped his own coffee, then grimaced at the bitterness and threw it in the nearest garbage can. “Josiah’s with him now. Hasn’t woken up since that first few minutes.”

“I did that to him,” Chris whispered.

It was an admission he had made to himself many times in the last month—early on, when he visited Ezra’s eerily quiet hospital room, and later, when they’d all forced their company on the man in the hopes of drawing him out of his silence—but he’d never said it aloud.

It hurt worse than he could imagine.

“Because you chose Agent Tanner over him?”

Fuck. Over anything...

> ”Ambulance is on its way, Chris.”
> 
> Buck. There. Picking up the pieces as usual. JD stood next to him and Chris saw the revulsion and fear thick in the kid’s eyes in that brief second that he looked up from Vin’s bloody torso.
> 
> “Come on, JD,” Buck whispered, his voice fading from Chris’s hearing as they moved off. “Let’s go check on Nathan and Ezra.”
> 
> “Chris?”
> 
> Vin’s call had been weak as water, but he was all Chris was focused on and it sounded loud as a scream. “Ez okay?”
> 
> He wasn’t, but Chris hadn’t known that yet. He was devastated later to realize that at that moment, he hadn’t cared. “He’ll be okay, Vin. You both will.”
> 
> Vin had snorted. “Yeah, we’ll see…” His breath was stolen by a coughing fit that left him gray. “Sorry, Chris,” he whispered, sliding sideways into oblivion for a while. “I’m so damn sorry….”

“Agent Larabee?”

Chris stared at his hands and watched them shake. He couldn’t live like this. He couldn’t make personal choices with such God damned over-arching consequences….

“Have you spoken to Agent Tanner since he was released from the hospital?”

The non sequitur threw him for a moment and he looked up at her. “He’s healing up.”

“I didn’t ask how he was doing,” she said quietly, eyes candid and knowing. “Have you spoken to him?”

Buck and JD and Nathan had taken turns checking up on their sniper that first couple of weeks, and Chris knew Vin had been out to the ranch a few times, using his forced medical leave to try to find a bit of peace after such brutality. If he’d found any, Chris wouldn’t know—he’d been staying in a residential hotel near the office since….

“He was just doing his job, you said.”

Chris snorted at the comment and the question behind it. “I don’t hate Vin Tanner.”

 _I hate myself. I hate that I let it get this far—that I let him get so far inside me that I’m willing to risk anything and anyone to keep him safe._ “He’s a good agent.” _He needs to be only that._

_And I can’t let him be._

“What about Agent Standish? When will he be cleared for active duty?”

Chris shook his head and didn’t answer right away. Josiah called him just a few days ago, as he waited for Nathan to show up at his place. He’d dragged Ezra away from his apartment and brought him to Josiah’s own big Victorian, ostensibly to _supervise_ the renovation of the back bedroom. Ezra had seemed fine for a while until something had set him off, and he’d spent half an hour with a hammer in his broken hands, tearing apart the wall. He couldn’t go out in the field the way he was, and the desk duty and the trauma and the flashbacks were slowly killing him.

“Doctors say his hands will be healed in six weeks, but he’ll need a lot of physical therapy before he can pass weapons training.” As if anyone would let Ezra even _have_ a gun at this point. He’d probably aim it at his boss before the bad guys.

Ezra blamed Chris for everything, and Chris didn’t disagree. He’d roped the man into the damn team four years ago, kept him there with misplaced guilt on Ezra’s part that Chris hadn’t bothered to assuage, and now he'd done the one thing he knew Ezra Standish couldn’t come back from. He’d left him out to dry. Again. Just like those bastards in the FBI.

And Vin. Hell, what Chris had done to him—what Chris had just fucking _let happen_ to him—well that was even worse, wasn’t it?

Maybe it was time to let his team stand on their own. Where they were safer….

Melanie gave a sigh. “Good news for you,” she said quietly. “Your time is up.” Chris looked at the clock, shocked to see so much time had gone by while he figured out what he had to do. He shot to his feet and was headed for the door when her voice stopped him. “Talk to your agents, Mr. Larabee,” she counseled. She seemed to know that the words fell on deaf ears and said half-heartedly, “Have my assistant schedule another meeting for next week.”

Chris shook his head and looked over his shoulder at her.

“I told you when I walked in, Doctor,” he murmured with a grim smile. “I’ve done this before.”

And as he’d screamed in the night a week after Sarah and Adam had been laid in the ground, Chris whispered in his soul, “Never again.”

*******  
the end


End file.
